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L E T T
POWER OF ATTORNEY
Can progressive prosecutors achieve meaningful
I
n a Walmart parking lot in Ports-
mouth, Virginia, in 2015, a white
police officer named Stephen
Rankin shot and killed an unarmed,
eighteen-year- old black man
named William Chapman. “This
is my second one,” he told a by-
stander seconds after firing the
fatal shots, seemingly in reference
to an incident four years earlier,
when he had shot and killed an-
other unarmed man, an immi-
grant from Kazakhstan. Rankin,
a Navy veteran, had been arrest-
ing Chapman for shoplifting
when, he claimed, Chapman
charged him in a manner so
threatening that he feared for his
life, leaving him no option but to
shoot to kill—the standard and
almost invariably successful de-
fense for officers when called to
account for shooting civilians.
Rankin had faced no charges for
his earlier killing, but this time,
something unexpected hap-
pened: Rankin was indicted on a
charge of first-degree murder by
Portsmouth’s newly elected chief
prosecutor, thirty-one-year-old
Stephanie Morales. Furthermore,
she announced that she would try
the case herself, the first time she
had ever prosecuted a homicide. “No
one could remember us having an ac-
tual prosecution for the killing of an
unarmed person by the police,” Morales
Andrew Cockburn is the Washington editor
of Harper’s Magazine and the author, most
recently, of Kill Chain: The Rise of the
High-Tech Assassins.
Illustration by Adrià Fruitós
Cockburn Letter Final 10.indd 35
E R F R O M W A S H
criminal-justice reform?
By Andrew Cockburn
told me. “I got a lot of feedback, a lot of
people saying, ‘You shouldn’t try this
case. If you don’t win, it may affect your
reelection. Let someone else do it.’ ”
The case reached court a year later.
An eyewitness testified that Rankin
had been in no immediate danger, and
forensic evidence showed that the of-
ficer had been some distance away
from Chapman when he fired. When
the defense argued that Chapman had
approached Rankin aggressively, Mo-
08132019171733
I N G T O N
rales pointed out that Rankin had
“brought a gun into what is at best a
fist fight.” After a four-day trial, the
jury found Rankin guilty of voluntary
manslaughter, earning him a two-
and-a-half-year sentence that was
later upheld on appeal.
Since taking office, Morales
has sharply reduced the number
of people in her jurisdiction sent
to prison—which, counterintui-
tively, has cost her resources,
since the state uses indictments
as a yardstick for allocating
funds—moved to end prosecu-
tion for marijuana possession,
and done her best to end the in-
carceration of people who cannot
afford to post bail. She has also
indicted a second Portsmouth
officer, Jeremy Durocher, for
shooting a fleeing black eighteen-
year-old named Deontrace Ward
in the back, an act that had
earned the shooter an officer of
the month award and a medal of
valor. To date, Morales is just one
of three prosecutors in the entire
nation to have indicted more
than one police officer for shoot-
ing black men with a gun or taser
(Durocher is still awaiting trial).
Morales, who is black, is also
the first woman to be elected as a
Portsmouth commonwealth’s attor-
ney, as district attorneys are called in
Virginia. An assistant prosecutor
when she initially ran for the office
in a February 2015 special election,
Morales defeated two opponents, one
of whom was backed by the police
LETTER FROM WASHINGTON 35
8/13/19 3:01 PM
 union. For years the office had been
headed by a traditional law-and-
order prosecutor dedicated first and
foremost to winning cases, and Mo-
rales had observed the ways that
approach all too often destroyed peo-
ple’s lives. She noted the racist
injustices routinely generated in the
courtroom, where a white defendant
in a petty larceny case would escape
without a criminal record and a
black defendant on a similar charge
would be offered no such leniency. “It
was really eye-opening,” she told me,
“to see in real life where someone
could do something entirely dif-
ferent with a similarly situated
case and potentially change some-
body’s life. One for the better, by
giving them a second chance, and
the other for the worse, by not
giving them a second chance.”
Rather than simply enabling the
conveyor belt from arrests to convic-
tion and punishment, Morales re-
solved to act as “somebody who’s in-
vested in the success of the overall
community and not just the success of
a case.” Time and again, in our long
conversations over the phone and in her
office, she emphasized her holistic vision
of the job: “providing every service that
is within my power to ensure that people
get opportunities to thrive in life.”
Above all, she reiterated, she keeps in
mind that no case happens in isolation
from the surrounding community. Ports-
mouth is a majority-black, working-class
city of around one hundred thousand
people. As one might expect, its popula-
tion has a more intimate acquaintance
with the criminal-justice system than
whiter, more suburban areas where, as
Morales observed, “people don’t have to
think about the implications when
someone has been accused of a crime
and ends up incarcerated and has to
raise bail.” In her community, she says,
the question may well be, “Who is com-
ing up with that bail money? It may be a
wife or a mother.”
Even if her Portsmouth constituents
have not been directly embroiled in the
criminal-justice system themselves, they
may well have a family member or a
church friend who has. These are the
people who elected her, Morales said,
and she wants them to view her as a
“public servant” rather than as a de-
tached and impersonal instrument of
36 HARPER’S MAGAZINE / OCTOBER 2019
Cockburn Letter Final 10.indd 36
law enforcement. She instructs her pros-
ecutors (almost all of whom she has
hired since taking office, replacing the
team she inherited) to look at a case
from every single angle rather than
simply working off the arrest-charge
sheet supplied by police, and to see
“whether [a defendant] has a history of
mental illness, whether this person has
physical ailments. Do we know the
conditions that they were raised in?
Have [we] spoken to every victim and
every witness?” To that end, she has
hired an investigator—a veteran ho-
micide detective—to probe cases and
IN EFFECT, PROSECUTORS,
RATHER THAN JUDGES OR JURIES,
DECIDE WHOM TO PUNISH
AND HOW SEVERELY
provide her with fuller details on cases,
independent of the police.
Relations with the force during the
four years Morales has been in office
have not exactly been smooth, to the
extent that her chief opponent in her
2017 reelection campaign pledged to
voters that he would “mend relation-
ships with the Portsmouth Police De-
partment.” But, just as Morales tasks her
prosecutors with taking every human
element of a case into consideration, she
strives to encourage the Portsmouth
police to conduct themselves in the
same manner. One afternoon in early
June, I accompanied her over to the
local police academy for a class she had
organized. The police chief, she told me,
had agreed that “a conversation about
treating people with dignity would be
really good for new recruits.”
When we arrived, three assistant
prosecutors were explaining some
basic points relating to officers’ legal
obl ig ation s u nder t he Four t h
Amendment— specifically, how and
when a straightforward traffic stop could
be expanded to search a vehicle, a topic
on which the students’ understanding
sounded distinctly cloudy. “How am I
going to investigate if I can’t make a
search?” asked one of the officers. “We’re
talking about accountability to our citi-
zens, right?” said Morales, taking control
of the discussion. “I want to relieve the
08132019171733
pressure and let you know that you’re
not going to always have a full investiga-
tion on every stop,” she continued. “I’m
not saying that I think you guys want to
arrest everybody. I just want to let you
know that there are times when it’s not
going to result in an investigation, and
that’s okay.”
I
t is no secret that strange things
are happening in the world of
American criminal justice. Mass
incarceration has become a cause for
national concern—even Donald Trump
finds it in his interest to brag about his
role in effecting reform, however
limited. Most importantly, in big
cities across the country, tradition-
ally punitive prosecutors’ offices are
being taken over by enlightened
newcomers. Some of these upsets
have received national attention,
such as the election of the defense
lawyer and civil-rights activist Larry
Krasner as district attorney in Phila-
delphia, Kim Foxx in Chicago, Wesley
Bell in St. Louis, and Melissa Nelson in
Jacksonville, Florida, not to mention
the recent narrow loss by Tiffany Cabán
to a machine-backed candidate in
Queens, New York. These electoral re-
sults have been fueled, to a considerable
extent, by the fury directed at police
shootings, and the newly elected pros-
ecutors have pledged to make their of-
fices accountable to the communities
they serve.
It is impossible to understand the
importance of this change without be-
ing aware of the enormous power
wielded by prosecutors in this country.
Most people who end up in jail or pris-
on arrive courtesy of the twenty-seven
thousand prosecutors in county and
city district attorney offices across the
country. (Prisoners in federal lockups
account for only 12 percent of the na-
tional prison population.) Some offices
are enormous, such as that of the Los
Angeles County D.A., with one thou-
sand prosecutors and a budget of over
$400 million, and others are tiny, such
as the two-person office in Rappah-
annock County, Virginia. In almost
every state (except Alaska, Con-
necticut, and New Jersey), district
attorneys are elected. Despite the
potential for democratic account-
ability, however, D.A.  offices have
traditionally assumed low profiles.
8/13/19 3:01 PM

Incumbents can generally expect
lengthy tenure untroubled by electoral
opponents, with voter indifference re-
flected in minimal turnout on Elec-
tion Day. The 12  percent turnout in
Morales’s first election, for example,
was typical. Yet the power of any
D.A.’s office is “gigantic,” in the
words of Rob Smith, the executive di-
rector of The Justice Collaborative, a
criminal-justice reform organization.
“Think of it this way,” he told me.
“The most powerful single individual
who can personally and directly affect
the largest number of individual lives
in this country is not Donald Trump.
It’s Jackie Lacey, district attorney for
Los Angeles County. There are fully
ten million people in the area covered
by her office that she can potentially
choose to indict, or not indict, on
major or lesser charges, send to jail or
not, and all without having to refer to
the city council or anyone else.” Smith
singled out Lacey because her office
covers a larger population than any-
where else, but D.A.s across the coun-
try exercise similarly untrammeled
power. For this reason, in his 2017
book Locked In, Fordham law professor
John Pfaff identified increasingly puni-
tive prosecutors as the central cause of
the decades-long explosion in the
U.S.  prison population. Ninety-five
percent of criminal cases, he pointed
out, are never tried in court. Rather,
prosecutors deploy plea bargains as a
potent tool in eliciting guilty pleas
from defendants, especially poor ones,
who dare not gamble on a trial. The
result is that prosecutors, rather than
judges or juries, decide whom to pun-
ish and how severely. Decades ago,
plea agreements were merely an op-
tion, but today, given the threat of
extraordinarily harsh sentences,
defendants— those accused of drug
crimes in particular—cannot afford to
reject the offer of a shorter spell be-
hind bars in exchange for a guilty plea.
Additionally, prosecutors decide
whether to charge offenses as misde-
meanors or felonies—a distinction that
largely determines whether an arrest
will lead to prison. Between 1994 and
2008, Pfaff observed, the national
crime rate fell sharply and the number
of police arrests fell by some 10 percent,
but the likelihood that an arrest would
lead to a felony case doubled. Pfaff’s
Cockburn Letter Final 10.indd 37
Interviewer:
analysis questioned the significance of How did you decide that
other factors that are commonly in-
voked as prime causes fueling mass you wanted to litigate
incarceration, most prominently the
war on drugs (only 20 percent of people cases that would focus
in prison are there for drug offenses) in on increasing equality
and the rise of the private-prison indus-
try and its attendant lobbyists (only for women?
8  percent of prisoners are housed in
private facilities). Critics have pointed
out that this analysis downplays the Ruth Bader Ginsburg:
large numbers of people convicted of
drug offenses who churn through the You mean, how did I
system with short sentences and still
emerge with a felony record, but Pfaff’s
decide to become a
point that prosecutors are the driving flaming feminist litigator?
force in herding people into prison
nevertheless stands.
The late Harvard law professor Wil-
liam Stuntz, an eloquent critic of mass
incarceration, argued that historically
the role of the prosecutor as an instru-
ment of blind injustice is a consequence
of the changing composition of Amer-
ican cities. Once upon a time, prosecu-
tors represented the populations they
served. As Irish immigrants flooded
into Boston in the late nineteenth cen- New: The Flaming Feminist
tury, for example, the prosecutors they Enamel Pin
elected—along with mayors, other lo-
cal officials, and the police force—came
out of the same community. But even
though that surge in immigration co- Get 20% off our
incided with a crime wave, mass incar- complete collection at
ceration did not explode as it did a
century later. As Stuntz wrote, dissentpins.com/flame
Cops, crime victims, criminals, and the
50%
jurors who judged them—these were
not wholly distinct communities; they
overlapped. . . . Rage at the depredations
of criminals was tempered by empathy
for defendants charged with [a] crime:
one hesitates before sending neighbors’
sons to the state penitentiary.
Then, in the mid-twentieth century,
the Great Migration brought new black OF PROFITS DONATED TO
populations to Northern cities from
the American South. Unlike the ear- BRONX FREEDOM FUND
lier influx of immigrants, however,
they remained relatively powerless. As
crime became a major issue in majority- INT’L REFUGEE
black inner cities, police forces re- ASSISTANCE PROJECT
mained overwhelmingly white, with
few connections to the populations
they policed. (Portsmouth’s officers, for CENTER FOR
example, are still largely recruited
from veterans exiting military service
REPRODUCTIVE RIGHTS
at the giant naval base on the city’s
Dissent Pins
edge.) Likewise prosecutors became
LETTER FROM WASHINGTON 37
8/13/19 3:01 PM
08132019171733
 more isolated from the communities
over which they presided. Their elec-
toral districts tended to include not
only the largely black urban core but
also the white suburbs, and jurors no
longer had much of a role to play,
given overcrowded courts and prosecu-
tors’ overwhelming reliance on plea bar-
gains. Hence, the arrival of prosecutors
like Morales represents an existential
challenge to well-established patterns
of political authority and deeply in-
grained local power structures.
W
hen I frst met Morales, in
May, she had been having a
bad day. She didn’t show it
as she sat down to dinner, but a key vic-
tory in her fight to reform the local
criminal-justice system had just recently
been jeopardized, thanks to maneu-
vers by her political opponents in the
city. A month earlier, Morales had
fulfilled a campaign pledge to stop
prosecuting, and thereby imprisoning,
people for marijuana possession, secur-
ing the necessary agreement from the
city’s judges to dismiss such cases. “It
is really time we think about how we
start to decarcerate as opposed to
incarcerating for every type of crime,”
she said, announcing the initiative.
But now, a month later, the judges
had abruptly reversed their decision,
denying they had ever consented to
dismiss such charges. Morales angrily
pointed out that they were backtrack-
ing on a frm agreement.
Though Morales herself was dis-
creet as to who had fomented the re-
versal, my inquiries indicated that this
was the work of Louise Lucas, a local
black state senator who has a reputation
for getting her own way in the cut and
thrust of city politics. Fueling such sus-
picions was the fact that one of the
judges was married to one of Lucas’s
close friends and political allies. An-
other was Lucas’s neighbor. The senator,
a former shipyard worker who regularly
runs unopposed, appears to inspire a
certain degree of fear in the local com-
munity. No one with whom I talked
about Lucas was willing to be quoted on
the record. “She’s invulnerable,” one
resident told me. Lucas, through a legis-
lative assistant, declined to comment on
this article.
But Morales had shown that she
was not prepared to treat Lucas and
38 HARPER’S MAGAZINE / OCTOBER 2019
Cockburn Letter Final 10.indd 38
her circle with the deference they
were accustomed to receiving from
the city’s elected offcials. Morales
had, for example, requested a special
prosecutor in a case involving Lucas’s
preferred candidate for sheriff. Appar-
ently in response, Lucas, along with
two friends—themselves prominent
in local affairs—publicly announced
via Facebook that they were with-
drawing the support they had given
Morales in her initial election cam-
paign. “If the lies persist,” Lucas
commented darkly, “we will have no
option but to open Pandora’s Box.”
Morales retorted that she had “not
been elected to be anyone’s pawn.”
She told me, “I’ve heard [Lucas] con-
stantly say to people, ‘There’s no per-
manent friends and no permanent
enemies in politics.’ And I say, well,
you live and you learn every day, be-
cause she just found one. Once you
attack me, you’re done.”
A few weeks later, I was reminded
of the obstacles Morales faced in the
tangled hair ball of local politics as I
listened to Rashad Robinson, presi-
dent of the racial-justice organization
Color of Change, at a meeting of
criminal-justice reform activists in
Washington. His topic was the
post-election experience of prosecutors
who are elected on a program of re-
form. “How do we translate presence
to power?” he asked the room. “Pres-
ence is visibility on the front page of
the paper, but presence alone is not
power. Just simply being at the table
doesn’t mean that the rules change.”
This is a lesson being absorbed around
the country, in cities and counties
where recently elected progressive
prosecutors have generated strong and
in some cases vicious reactions from
within the offces they have inherited,
as well as from local elites whose set-
tled ways they have challenged. As
soon as the former public defender
Wesley Bell was elected in St. Louis
County, for example, the prosecutors
in his offce joined the police union.
Kim Foxx, elected on the back of a
police-shooting scandal and cover-up,
has faced determined and concerted
opposition from the Chicago police,
and the Democratic governor of Penn-
sylvania, Tom Wolf, has happily signed
a bill put forth by Republicans in the
state assembly that allows the state
08132019171734
attorney general to override Larry
Krasner’s authority on the prosecution
of certain crimes in Philadelphia. The
Fraternal Order of Police, meanwhile,
has erected billboards around that city
proclaiming enough is enough.
These new big-city prosecutors have
yet to run for reelection and thus dis-
cover whether their constituents—as
opposed to special-interest groups like
the police—endorse their actions. Mo-
rales, however, faced reelection in No-
vember 2017 and chose to run proudly
on her progressive record. In contrast
to her first campaign, Morales de-
scribed the second as “long, drawn-out,
and nasty” with “negative article after
negative article after negative article”
in the local media. Days before the
vote, the Virginian-Pilot, the dominant
local paper, bemoaning “an absence of
confidence in how the incumbent
leads so important an offce,” and dis-
approvingly citing the turnover in her
office, endorsed Morales’s opponent.
Bizarrely, the paper hailed this indi-
vidual, a local, independently wealthy
defense attorney who had pledged to
mend relations with police, as “the
candidate for change.” Powerful local
politicians such as Senator Lucas and
her allies had already turned against
Morales, but such opposition was
no match for the furious energy
with which Morales tore into her
second campaign. Across the length
and breadth of the city, she un-
stintingly promoted her agenda of
cutting the prison population—
“whatever the number is of people
who are incarcerated coming out of
my city, it’s too many”— ending the
system of cash bail, and instituting
other reforms. In the end, Morales not
only won, but crushed her opponent
by a defnitive 26 percent margin.
M
orales’s initial victory in 2015
marked a breach in the dam
that was quickly followed by
a flood of progressive victories in major
cities. Years before, however, one cam-
paign had prefgured her success. It hap-
pened in Albany, New York, in 2004,
and was powered by opposition to the
Rockefeller drug laws, the viciously re-
pressive measures introduced in 1973 by
then-governor Nelson Rockefeller. Pre-
viously progressive on drug policy,
Rockefeller nurtured national ambi-
8/13/19 3:01 PM
 tions, and sought to toughen his image
by imposing harsh penalties for posses-
sion of even small quantities of drugs,
including marijuana. The New York
State prison population exploded, grow-
ing by some 500 percent over the next
thirty years. Despite widespread
criticism—Rockefeller’s own brother
and granddaughter advocated against
the laws—serious efforts at reform
were unsuccessful.
“The legislators wouldn’t do any-
thing because they were scared of be-
ing denounced by district attorneys as
soft on crime,” Bill Lipton, one of the
original organizers of the New York
Working Families Party (W.F.P.),
told me. “So, we had to make an
example of a D.A. in order to give
the legislature the push they needed
to act.” As the 2004 elections ap-
proached, Lipton’s research revealed
that there was a big opportunity in
Albany, a city that had long been
under the rule of a Democratic ma-
chine legendary for its ironclad grip on
power. The Democratic incumbent
running for reelection, Paul Clyne,
was, in Lipton’s words, “a real
right-wing Democrat, a leading spokes-
person for defending the Rockefeller
drug laws.” He was also vice president
of the New York District Attorneys
Association, a private organization
that lobbied in defense of the laws.
Furthermore, Clyne was the offspring
of a powerful Albany Democratic
family—his father was John Clyne, an
influential judge known as “Maximum
John” for his habit of handing down
exceptionally harsh sentences—and
was thus deemed invulnerable.
To run against Clyne, Lipton and
W.F.P. colleagues managed to recruit
an assistant prosecutor named David
Soares, the son of immigrants from
Cape Verde. (In hopes of protecting
his job, Soares dutifully reported his
intentions to Clyne, who promptly fired
him.) “We did it fast,” recalls Lipton,
nostalgically. “At the beginning, there
was incredible skepticism in the
African-American community. I heard
a lot of, ‘This is a plantation’; ‘You have
no idea what you’re getting into’; ‘This
guy hasn’t paid his dues’; ‘No one’s
heard of him.’ ” Financing to the tune
of $80,000 from the copious coffers of
George Soros was deployed to build an
intense field operation. “Toward the
Cockburn Letter Final 10.indd 39
end, it felt like a social movement. I
remember thinking this sense of opti-
mism and mobilization must have been
a little bit of what it felt like in the
civil-rights movement,” recalls Lipton.
“I remember seeing people, especially
in the projects—poor, working-class
black people—with hope in their eyes,
like, ‘Really? The D.A.? We could have
a black guy as D.A.?’ Because it was
almost inconceivable that, in a place
like Albany, law enforcement could be
something that the black community
had some power over.” Soares beat
Clyne by twenty-one points in the
PROGRESSIVE PROSECUTORS HAVE
GENERATED VICIOUS REACTIONS
FROM WITHIN THE OFFICES
THEY HAVE INHERITED
all-important Democratic primary,
and continued on to a comfortable
victory over a Republican. His cam-
paign had one central theme: “Paul
Clyne supports the Rockefeller drug
laws.” Soon after Soares’s victory, the
state legislature began a rollback of
the heinous measures. Soares, having
won reelection multiple times, remains
the Albany district attorney to this day.
In another way, however, the victory
proved hollow. “I spent the next ten
years trying to raise money for another
D.A.  race,” Lipton told me. “I said,
‘We’ve had this incredible victory. We
can do it again.’ But I couldn’t get any
interest.” A decade later, though, a se-
ries of events connected to police vio-
lence against black Americans finally
initiated a broader shift toward
long-delayed reform. The most well-
known of these was the August 2014
killing of Michael Brown in Ferguson,
Missouri, and the subsequent refusal of
a grand jury convened by St.  Louis
County prosecutor Robert McCulloch
to indict the shooter, which sparked the
Black Lives Matter movement. Then,
the next year, Dale Cox, the first as-
sistant district attorney of Caddo Par-
ish, Louisiana, told a reporter from the
Shreveport Times, “We need to kill more
people. . . . I think the death penalty
should be used more often. It has come
to the place in our society where it is
08132019171734
used less often, and I think crime in our
society has expanded so expeditiously.”
Though buried deep in the article, the
gruesome quote, along with other sim-
ilarly unbalanced comments by Cox,
drew national attention, especially
when it emerged that Caddo Parish had
been sending more people per capita to
death row—most of them black—than
any other county in the United States,
with a majority of these cases having
been prosecuted by Cox himself. That
fall’s election for Caddo D.A. elicited
not only national attention but also
nearly half a million dollars in cam-
paign funding from Soros.
Far to the north, a nonjudicial
execution spurred a still more mo-
mentous result. In Chicago, Kim
Foxx was running for state’s attor-
ney (the Illinois term for a D.A.) for
Cook County, which encompasses
the city. The incumbent, Anita
Alvarez, had chalked up a strong
record of condoning police miscon-
duct, however egregious, but enjoyed
widespread support among the Latino
community, making Foxx’s struggle
an uphill battle. Then a judge ordered
the release of video showing a Chi-
cago policeman, Jason Van Dyke,
murdering Laquan McDonald by
pumping sixteen shots into his back
as the seventeen-year-old lay wounded
on the ground. Alvarez, in concert
with Mayor Rahm Emanuel, had de-
liberately suppressed the tape for a
year. Its release gave a powerful boost
to Foxx’s campaign, and she eventu-
ally powered to a nineteen-point vic-
tory in the March 2016 primary and a
forty-four-point wipeout over a Repub-
lican in the general election, margins
confirming that a progressive agenda
may actually represent mainstream
opinion. The degree of change repre-
sented by this kind of upset is illus-
trated by a story Foxx later told Ra-
shad Robinson. Shortly after taking
office, Foxx gave her staff a list of the
community activists she wanted to
meet with: people who had supported
her campaign, people who had advo-
cated around police and judicial re-
form. The staff demurred, telling her,
“These are the people who are banned
from our office.”
“You’re going to have to unban
them,” retorted Foxx, “so they can
come upstairs.”
LETTER FROM WASHINGTON 39
8/13/19 3:01 PM
 It was important that these activ­
ists be allowed upstairs not only as a
demonstration of Foxx’s new author­
ity, but also because they had been a
major force in her victory and were
now the constituency to whom she
answered. Whereas there was no
broader movement in the wake of
the Albany victory after Soros tem­
porarily lost interest in the issue, to­
day’s push for reform is backed by a
wide array of forces. Soros has given
important support in select races,
such as those in Chicago and Phila­
delphia, while the involvement of
national grassroots organizations,
such as Color of Change, or local
ones, such as the Texas Organizing
Project, have funded others. The
Real Justice PAC has raised almost
$2  million from small donors for re­
form campaigns since the start of
2018, and other new resources are be­
ing provided by funders advised by
groups such as the Open Philan­
thropy Project. (Full disclosure: this
writer’s daughter, Chloe Cockburn,
directs giving on criminal­justice re­
form at Open Philanthropy.) As a
result, today’s reform effort has a far
deeper bench than it did in 2004, and
it is thereby much better equipped to
withstand the inevitable backlash
from entrenched interests.
O
n June 25 of this year, Demo­
crats in Queens, New York,
voted in the primary that
would effectively select the next D.A.
The previous day, Pamela Liebman,
CEO of the Corcoran Group, a leading
New York real estate agency, sent her
two thousand employees an email:
Though the D.A.’s authority may not
have a direct effect on the real estate
business in Queens or the other bor­
oughs, a far­left candidate’s election to
this influential post sets a precedent
that could severely stunt our
business—in the borough and beyond.
She therefore made abundantly clear
her preference for Melinda Katz, a can­
didate who had already reaped a third
of her campaign funds from the real
estate industry.
Liebman had it right. Tiffany Cabán,
the so­called far­left candidate, did in­
deed pose a threat to established inter­
40 HARPER’S MAGAZINE / OCTOBER 2019
Cockburn Letter Final 10.indd 40
ests, and not just because she was a queer
Latinx public defender pledging to cut
mass incarceration by ending cash bail;
raise the standard of proof required for
charging misdemeanors; refuse to pros­
ecute sex workers and recreational drug
users; and institute a host of other re­
forms. Given that the Queens office
under the previous D.A., the late Rich­
ard Brown, had distinguished itself by
resisting reform and sending people to
jail for minor misdemeanors, Cabán’s
message was bound to resonate. But she
proclaimed an even wider agenda of
economic justice, promising, for ex­
ample, to investigate and prosecute
abusive landlords. “Bad landlords
should not be landlords,” declared her
website. “If they have property in
Queens, they will be held accountable
in Queens. Bad landlords will be forced
to provide adequate housing.” To a real
estate industry that had recently seen
the glittering prize of Amazon’s pro­
posed invasion of Queens snatched
away thanks to popular mobilization,
such talk must have seemed ominous
indeed. For corporate interests,
Cabán’s express intentions of pursu­
ing “innovative and proactive en­
forcement against discriminatory,
monopolistic policies and practices
that destroy our neighborhood econo­
mies” was the stuff of nightmares.
The thirty­ one­year­ old Cabán
seemed an unlikely prospect to take on
Katz and the Queens Democratic ma­
chine. She had been a public defender
for seven years, and had no experience
running a large office, let alone an
operation as big as the Queens D.A. or­
ganization, which employs some three
hundred attorneys. But the machine
had been caught unawares by the 2018
victory of Cabán’s fellow Democratic
Socialist Alexandria Ocasio­Cortez,
whose district includes a large portion
of north­central Queens, and was now
alert to the threat of new candidates
coming from the left. More than simply
selecting a D.A., the election was also
about who should wield power in New
York—grassroots progressives or a hide­
bound, corrupt Democratic machine.
Katz herself had, from the Demo­
cratic establishment’s viewpoint, a deep
background in city politics and thus an
entirely acceptable résumé. She was the
Queens borough president, a former
New York City Council member—where
08132019171734
she was an influential player in rezoning
decisions— and a former real estate
industry lobbyist. Accordingly, she gar­
nered a slew of potent endorsements,
including from Governor Andrew
Cuomo, along with five members of
Congress, notably Gregory Meeks,
whose district covers most of the bor­
ough, as well as the powerful Local
32BJ of the Service Employees Interna­
tional Union, an especially strong force
in south­ central Queens’s large
African­American community. Indicat­
ing how much D.A. politics had shifted
leftward, however, Katz’s platform was
that of a moderate progressive, pledging
to roll back low­level drug prosecutions
and proposing other benign measures,
though stopping far short of Cabán’s
more ambitious proposals.
For Bill Lipton, the election brought
back happy memories of the epic battle
for Albany fifteen years prior. Initially
skeptical of Cabán’s chances because of
her inexperience, he soon changed his
mind. “The D.S.A. [Democratic Social­
ists of America] were supporting her
early on. Then we [the Working Fami­
lies Party] endorsed,” said Lipton. “It
was really a lot like the Soares cam­
paign in terms of momentum. All hap­
pening very fast, and grassroots energy.”
Schooled by years of struggle in the
unsparing world of New York elec­
toral politics, the W.F.P. was in a posi­
tion to give the Cabán campaign
considerable organizational help.
Lipton lent a hand by helping to
write a campaign plan, as well as
hiring the campaign manager and
finding the communications director.
Overall, Cabán enjoyed the support
of a formidable grassroots coalition,
including not just the D.S.A.  and
W.F.P., but also VOCAL, an advo­
cacy group originally focused on
H.I.V. victims that has since expanded
to confront issues like mass incar­
ceration; the immigrant­rights group
Make the Road New York; and reso­
nant endorsements from Bernie Sand­
ers, Elizabeth Warren, Larry Krasner,
and Alexandria Ocasio­Cortez. More
surprisingly, the New York Times en­
dorsed Cabán in a strongly worded
editorial lauding her as “unencum­
bered by ties to the borough power
structure and free to pursue her com­
mitment to serve the community by
doing more than just winning convic­
8/13/19 3:01 PM
 tions.” The endorsement’s pri mary
author was Mara Gay, a young black
journalist who appears to be dragging
the venerable organ, or at least its
editorial pages, into modern times on
such pressing issues.
Following a recount, Katz was de-
clared the winner by fifty-five votes, but
either way, Cabán’s emergence and
meteoric rise demonstrated that the
grip of the New York Democratic ma-
chine is slackening. Last year, the
Working Families Party successfully
helped to defeat the Independent Dem-
ocratic Conference (I.D.C.), a group of
New York state senators who regularly
voted with Republicans, thereby en-
abling Governor Cuomo’s efforts to
control the agenda and block reforms
advanced by the Democratic majority.
As a result of the I.D.C.’s elimination,
the legislature was able to pass a
progressive-driven raft of measures,
including bills addressing sexual harass-
ment, reproductive rights, criminal
justice, and rent control and other
affordable-housing legislation.
The current upheaval of progressive
prosecutors has two further profound
implications for American politics.
First, while deploying “progressive” as
a convenient description for this new
breed of prosecutor might suggest that
the movement is synonymous with
l e f t- w i n g D e m o c r a t s o f t h e
Ocasio-Cortez variety, it is by no
means an exclusively Democratic pre-
serve, since the need to reform an in-
iquitous system has a certain amount
of bipartisan appeal. Charles Koch
himself quietly funds reform efforts,
and Mark Holden, the general coun-
sel at Koch Industries, has argued that
“criminal-justice reform is good for all
of us—the rich, the poor, and every-
one else.” Pat Nolan, a former Re-
publican legislator who was himself
incarcerated for receiving illegal cam-
paign contributions, has spent de-
cades working to mobilize support for
reform. And in Jacksonville, Florida,
former state’s attorney Angela
Corey—who had earned the title of
“cruelest prosecutor in America” from
The Nation for her eagerness to crowd
death row and lock up children for
life—was unseated in a 2016 Republi-
can primary by Melissa Nelson, a cor-
porate lawyer who ran on a pledge to
radically reshape Corey’s harsh re-
Cockburn Letter Final 10.indd 41
gime. By no stretch of the imagination
a progressive Democrat, Nelson has
nevertheless largely fulfilled her
“ DAVID HOLDRIDGE
describes humanitarian aid
from the ground up, a different
promise. Among other innovations,
she’s instituted a human-rights divi- and fascinating perspective.”
sion headed by a former defense attor- — JOSEPH S. NYE, former dean of the
ney to investigate police misconduct Harvard Kennedy School of Government
and imposed strict controls on incar-
cerating juveniles. Just as an issue like
Medicare for All is presented as a
far-left initiative despite polls indicat-
ing widespread support across the po-
litical spectrum, so too does the notion
of criminal-justice reform as a strictly
“progressive” priority elide the fact
that it’s also endorsed by elements on
the right.
In addition, the office of district
attorney has long been a rung on the
ladder of political ascent, whose
climbers believe that nothing embel-
lishes a résumé like a punitive rec-
ord. That sentiment—just like the
recent push for criminal-justice
reform— has been bipartisan, es-
poused both by Jeff Sessions in his
early days as an Alabama prosecutor
and by Kamala Harris as D.A. in San
Francisco. As of July 2017, at least A MEMOIR BY DAVID HOLDRIDGE
thirty-eight states had had a senator,
governor, or attorney general in the WINNER OF THE PRIZE AMERICANA
past ten years who was once a prose-
cutor, according to Fordham law pro-
fessor Jed Shugerman, who has made THE AVANT GARDE
a special study of the phenomenon.
In his view, prosecution as a “step- OF WESTERN CIV
ping stone for higher office” has had
“dramatic consequences in Ameri-
can criminal law and mass incarcer- “David and his team in
ation.” If our future leaders no longer the Shia heartland of Iraq
make their way by striving to lock up
as many of their fellow citizens as represented the best values
possible and instead display a record and hopes of his country . . .
of “providing every service that is in pursuit of leaving some
within [their] power to ensure that lasting good behind within
people get opportunities to thrive in
life,” it will make for both a happier the larger Iraqi context of
and a more just country. dismay and disintegration.”
The established order may be strong
and motivated to resist change, but, as — CHRISTOPHER SHAYS,
Stephanie Morales says, “The people former congressman, R. Conn.
who’ve been elected are fighters.” Back
in her office, as she discussed the messy
realities of enforcing her agenda—courts,
for example, can mandate cash bail
whether she asks for it or not—she reit-
erated her sense of the difficulties before AVAILABLE ONLINE AT
her. “People are facing challenges all www.avantgardeofwesternciv.com
over,” she acknowledged. “But nobody is
giving up.” n
OR FOR PURCHASE FROM
AMAZON + BARNES & NOBLE
LETTER FROM WASHINGTON 41
8/13/19 3:01 PM
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